It's only being miserable that makes us happy

When Carol Thatcher said that a black tennis player looked a bit like a cartoon designed to ridicule his ethnicity, she probably thought that was exactly the kind of banal remark The One Show thrives on. Clearly no one has ever told her it's a touchy area. Maybe she had an unusual upbringing. But the real victim of her merciless dismissal is the British public who have been denied their now traditional week of recreational outrage while the BBC vacillates and disappoints. We've had to fall back on other topics of conversation.

"I don't know how many times I've cleaned my windscreen today!" a taxi driver said to me last week. I didn't either. I felt if anyone would, it'd be him. I didn't really understand why he needed to know; it's not like taking heart pills or getting married, events you ought to keep count of for your health and self-respect. My feeling was he could let that particular quest for remembrance go and get on with his life. What I said was: "Yeah!"

Because I think he meant he'd cleaned his windscreen (not got out and cleaned it, but pressed the button that makes the bonnet do a little upwards wee for the wipers to deal with) a lot of times that day. Many more times than usual. Because of all the grit. Because of all the snow.

What he meant was: "I see there's snow!" He was joining in with the national frenzy of snow-noticing and chaos-lamenting. "It's shameful! Look at us! They wouldn't bat an eyelid in Moscow, yet here it's got to the point where cab drivers have lost count, have actually lost count, of the number of times they've cleaned their windscreen just in one morning."

As one member of the public, interviewed on television outside a large, snow-covered London railway terminus, commented: "It's like a third world country!" Except a third world country's most pressing problem doesn't usually disappear of its own accord if you wait a few days.

"And you know the scorer on Test Match Special, Bill Frindall, he just died," continued the driver. Maybe he was thinking that, had Frindall been there, he might have kept count of the windscreen washes. At this point, the only interesting reply is: "Oh good!" Which has the disadvantage of also being horrible (and not, I hasten to add, a reflection of my opinion. It's very sad that he died. I'm against death. Although I suppose I haven't fully thought through the consequences if people didn't). So I said: "Oh dear."

I'm not criticising this man. He was just trying to reach out to another human and got me instead. People don't form bonds by exchanging controversial or scintillating remarks. We reassure each other by sharing observations of the obvious: death is sad, snow is here, Carol Thatcher should be sacked - oh, she has been! I mean, Carol Thatcher should be reinstated. Those are the things everyone really wants to discuss, not Gaza. Not that I'm in the habit of bringing up Gaza with taxi drivers, or only if I'm trying to lighten the mood by getting us off the congestion charge.

Snow seems to lighten the mood. Somebody once told me it's because its reflective qualities alleviate midwinter light deprivation. But that's exactly the sort of neat explanation that usually turns out to be bullshit - or a ploy to sell those expensive alarm clocks that pretend to be a gently emerging dawn. Take that view to its logical conclusion and I'll be persuaded to spend 20 minutes every day with my head in the freezer, shining a torch around.

No, people like any abnormal weather conditions because they're something to talk about. They relieve the monotony. As our parents told us when we were little: "You wouldn't like it if we had it all the time!" (Which, along with: "Don't eat it all at once" and: "It'll all end in tears", is from a genre of wisdom for which the phrase "Fuck off!" was invented.) They're a shared and completely safe topic of conversation. For half the week, strangers were exchanging twinkly-eyed glances as if to say: "Yes, we can all see it. A slight thing has happened."

Whatever our differences, we've all noticed the cold white stuff. Maybe the odd blizzard is what they need in Gaza? Scratch that, we're not talking grouchy commuters any more - those guys hate each other like you wouldn't believe. It would have to rain cheese sandwiches before they were distracted from that.

And when people have finished luxuriating in having noticed it, they can start talking about both what a nightmare and how ridiculous it all is. A nightmare, because everything's ground to a halt, and ridiculous because it shouldn't have done. This is where I start to isolate myself by saying things like: "What would be ridiculous is if Britain were as well prepared for snow as countries that experience it every year. That would involve having thousands of gritters and snow ploughs on expensive stand-by through years of mild drizzly winters." This, I've come to realise, is missing the point. People enjoy the complaining - they don't really give a damn about gritting budgets and my mentioning them is just as curmudgeonly as saying: "That'll only melt" to some children who are building a snowman.

A moan this year has been about the £1bn or more that the country has apparently lost because a fifth of the workforce didn't turn up last Monday. This is an adorable take on how much gets achieved in Britain on a Monday. Not only does it assume that the fifth that couldn't be bothered to struggle in are proportionally as profitable as the four-fifths that could, but also that none of the things that people consequently didn't do on Monday will ever get done. My view is that thousands of man-hours spent pissing around on Facebook may have been irretrievably lost but, come the thaw, the £1bn will be lying on the lawn next to the carrot and the woolly hat.